Sunday, August 29, 2010

City Island - DVD Review


***1/4

Starring Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Steven Strait, Emily Mortimer, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Ezra Miller, Alan Arkin, and Carrie Baker Reynolds.
Directed by Raymond De Felitta.

We get 10-20 dysfunctional-family movies a year, but this is better than most of them.

Andy Garcia is patriarch Vince Rizzo, a classic name for a guy who's not going to live to the end of a Sopranos episode, but he's basically a good guy, a corrections officer working at the prison, living in (on?) City Island, a section of New York that just doesn't get the pub. He's got a wife, a son and a daughter who each harbor secrets, and he harbors his own. We learn all these secrets fairly early; we as the audience can just enjoy to what lengths the family members go through to keep their secrets hidden.

Garcia did a really good job here as Vince, one of his more memorable roles. I also liked Julianna Margulies, queen of Chicago TV characters, in a New York blue-collar role she normally would not get offered. Especially good is the final ten minutes, where the houses of cards everyone has built comes crashing down.

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